GDC: Nintendo's Unreleased Portable Prototypes

The Kyoto company has a long history of innovative hardware, so you have to imagine that there are more than a few prototypes that never saw the light of day. At GDC, DSi design director Masato Kuwahara showed a few of these for the first time as he explained Nintendo's portable hardware design process.

Above, the company's first attempt at a next-generation color portable game system. This used a 32-bit ARM7 CPU, but at the time it was created, in 1995, the resultant form factor was just so huge that it never came to market. It's sitting next to a DSi in the photo. Imagine how huge it must have been.

The crazy thing is, I think I remember reading about this in Electronic Gaming Monthly – there were rumors that Nintendo was making a 32-bit portable called "Project Atlantis," if I recall correctly.

Kuwahara was apparently the first designer at Nintendo to experiment with touch-screen portable gameplay. He originally designed a touch-screen adapter that would attach to the Game Boy Color. Since the LCD screen didn't have a backlight, the internal reaction was "unfavorable," he said. When the Game Boy Advance SP came out, the reaction was slightly better, but it still never made it to market.

Even the Nintendo DSi had a complete overhaul in its design. Nintendo originally built it with two cartridge ports, so that players could easily carry two games around with them at once. But the resulting product was, again, so heavy and bulky – look at how much taller it is than the production DSi – that it, too, had to be totally overhauled.